Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.
Gaston BachelardRead
Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
Interpretation
Ideas are developed as responses to previous errors or shortcomings, aiming to refine our understanding.
In this quote, Gaston Bachelard suggests that the process of generating new ideas is inherently linked to learning from past mistakes. By continuously revising and correcting previous notions, we can uncover ideas that hold true value and validity, emphasizing the importance of reflection and adaptation in intellectual progress.
In practice
During a team meeting, to encourage innovation, one might say Bachelard's quote to emphasize learning from previous projects.
Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.
Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word.
How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.
If a poor family falls on hard times in the woods, and no one is around to care, did it really happen?
Sometimes a disappearance can be more haunting than an apparition.
Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die?
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and dryer than the will Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still
Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past.
The violence of the Left is symbolic, the injuries are not intended. The violence of the Right is real - directed at people, designed to cause injuries. Vietnam, nuclear weapons, police out of control are intentional forms of violence. The violence from the Right is aimed directly at people and the violence from the Left is aimed at institutions and symbols.
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